In regard to Mark Steyn’s note that NR writers were honored by an Atlantic blog, I too feel blessed that someone named David Wagner selected one of my columns as one of his supposedly 50 worst of the year on the basis on the following single paragraph:

Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review on Susan Rice It’s a great time to be a black woman, argues a white man named Victor Davis Hanson. “In the nexus of elite universities and Democratic politics,” Hanson writes about the Susan Rice confirmation holdup, “being black, female, and elite is far more advantageous that being white, male, and poor.” Right. Because we have so few white guys in politics, while the number of black female Senators can be counted on no hands.

One of the signs of a bad writer like this fellow Wagner is the inability to read. Wagner tries to refute my premise that being black, female, and elite is an advantage in Democratic politics and university life by lazily invoking “white guys in politics” and “black female Senators.” But is his “politics” synonymous at all with the nexus of “elite universities and Democratic politics” and are “white guys” the same as “white, male, and poor“?

Wagner has an uncanny ability to appear very stupid in a very brief space: Does this “white man named” David Wagner grasp that racially gerrymandered districts do not often result in black congressional representatives who appeal across racial lines and thus become competitive in statewide races? The reason why serious major national figures are emerging who are not so-called white, like a Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, or Bobby Jindal, is precisely because they did not run by focusing on their racial fides, and unlike the racially fixated Wagner (a “white man named Victor Hanson”) or a Sheila Jackson Lee, or a Maxine Waters, they see race as incidental rather than essential to our characters.

And note how Wagner nonsensically invokes the Senate in a matter of supposed racialism in the discussion over the presumed nomination of Rice as secretary of state — no wonder: Secretary of state is a position that has not seen a white male in the last 15 years, since the inept Warren Christopher, and thus is not a good example of Wagner’s racial obsessions.